June 15, 2015

The submission system for #WOIC2015 has gone live. For authors preparing their submissions to for the 2nd World Open Innovation Conference, as program chair I thought I'd share some recommendations on how to make a more effective submission.

Managerial relevance — for papers being considered for the special issue of California Management Review

Second are insights from the accepted and rejected submissions from last year's conference. After judging the WOIC 2014 submissions, last summer I posted thoughts about authors could put their best foot forward in the 1,500-3,000 word abstract format:

No need to include an abstract within your abstract.

The lit review needs to be drastically shortened — as in a real paper (or a PPT deck) it should be no more than 25% of the body of the paper.

Make sure your abstract communicates your contribution, not tells us what you hope your contribution will be someday. (If you don’t know yet, take your best guess — it will be better than ours).

Use as many words as you need to prove your point. What is your evidence? What are your methods? Measures?

Make the link to the conference theme explicit, as many papers were rejected for failing to notice that this is a conference about “open innovation” (as defined by the CFP). That said, the paper will be accepted based on its potential contribution, not on its fit to the conference.

Don’t claim “there’s no theory in open innovation” and promise to be the first one to solve this problem. (NB: unless you’ve read every single article, it’s probably dangerous to claim to be the first to do anything in any research stream that’s 10+ years old).

Authors have one more week (until midnight June 21) to submit their abstracts. Remember that this submission is abstract only, with full papers required only for accepted papers.